Election Thread

[Doc]

No, you don't understand yet.

Just because the Waltons, Bill Gates, or Warren Buffet might hold the lions share of digits on the wealth reports, does not mean that they have transferred those digits into holdings. If all the wealthy people insisted on transferring their wealth into physical assets, like land, stored grain, metals and minerals, only then would wealth hurt the less fortunate. So, the Debeers can own all the diamonds in the world for all I care, since I don't eat diamonds. If they start transferring their wealth into land holdings, and decreasing available farm land, then we have a problem.

Now, you mixed in a different issue with Walmart. Corporate success versus individual wealth.

Walmart has been successful in mastering efficiency in distribution of goods, and then obtaining a critical mass in merchandising. They are big enough to be able to tell a manufacturer, "if you make X and sell it for Y" we will buy the product from you. Vlassic, a pickle manufacturer, almost went bankrupt because of a bad deal. The power still rests in the decisions of the consumer, so if Mom and Pop's shop can keep the right products around at a reasonable price and convince people to buy their stuff they will stay in business. Walmart does well because they offer the products that people want at lower prices. From a capitalist perspective this is a good thing for consumers since they have driven inefficiency from the system of acquisition and distribution of goods, and that is reflected in the consumer being able to keep more of their wealth.

My son just asked me what I was writing to you about so I described it thus; Imagine their is a big birthday party, and we play tons of party games with the prizes being golden tokens. At the end of the party you can redeem your token for a piece of pie. So, you might redeem some tokens at the party, or leave the party with unspent tokens. But, should you get hungry later you can go into any cafe and redeem one for another piece of pie. As long as everyone plays and wins enough to get a single token in the games, then no one goes away without a piece of the pie. So the questions are; Is there enough pie to go around? Does everyone get to play in the games? Do unredeemed tokens matter to the happiness of the party goers? If Mike is skillful and lucky and wins a huge amount of tokens, would it be fair to then tell him to give away some tokens to others? Would you prevent Mike from playing the games, or make him do it blindfolded?

In the progressive socialist model everyone would be required to put 1/3 of their tokens into a hat, and they would be distributed to those who had less indexed by how few tokens they had. In the communist model, all the won tokens would be put into the hat, then redistributed equally. In the dictator model, one bully gets to determine who plays or not, then take anyones tokens at will and do whatever they want with them.

And in a democratic beaurocracy, the tokens would be lost. A committee would be formed to discuss the formation of a committee that one day may lead to a committee being formed to find out what happened to the tokens, or if the tokens even existed. Once the proper paperwork was filled out to form the committee of course, which takes a special committee to discuss what kind of paperwork is needed and why. A regulatory commission would also be formed as a watch dog group to make sure that all of these committies involved were not hoarding tokens for themselves. Another committee would be formed in a few weeks discussing on what do with with stale pie and whether or not it should cost fewer tokens, or if the poor even need tokens, and if there should be free hand outs of free stale pie to the poor. And then a distrobution committee is formed...

And sadly, one day, a special committee would be formed to come up with a study on why a masked gunman came in to the offices and sprayed everybody with an uzi screaming about all he wanted was his fair share of the pie.